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The Daily Signal
The Experts
Have Been Wrong About Lots of Things. Here’s a Sampling.
Walter E. Williams
July 25, 2018
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that if Donald Trump
were elected, there would be a protracted recession within 18 months.
Heeding its experts, a month before the election, the Washington Post
ran an editorial with the headline “A President Trump could destroy the
world economy.” Steve Rattner, a Democratic financier and former head
of the National Economic Council, warned, “If the unlikely event
happens and Trump wins, you will see a market crash of historic
proportions.”
When Trump’s electoral victory became apparent, Nobel Prize-winning
economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned that the
world was “very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in
sight.” By the way, Krugman has been so wrong in so many of his
economic predictions, but that doesn’t stop him from making more
shameless predictions.
People whom we’ve trusted as experts have often been wrong beyond
imagination, and it’s nothing new. Irving Fisher, a distinguished Yale
University economics professor in 1929, predicted, “Stock prices have
reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Three days later,
the stock market crashed.
In 1945, regarding money spent on the Manhattan Project, Adm. William
Leahy told President Harry S. Truman, “That is the biggest fool thing
we have ever done. The [atomic] bomb will never go off, and I speak as
an expert in explosives.”
In 1903, the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, advising Henry
Ford’s lawyer not to invest in Ford Motor Co., said, “The horse is here
to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” Confidence in the
staying power of the horse was displayed by a 1916 comment of the
aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Douglas Haig at a tank demonstration:
“The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is
absurd. It is little short of treasonous.”
Albert Einstein predicted: “There is not the slightest indication that
nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom
would have to be shattered at will.” In 1899, Charles H. Duell, the
U.S. commissioner of patents, said, “Everything that can be invented
has been invented.” Listening to its experts in 1936, The New York
Times predicted, “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s
atmosphere.”
To prove that it’s not just academics, professionals, and
businesspeople who make harebrained predictions, Hall of Fame baseball
player Tris Speaker’s 1919 advice about Babe Ruth was, “Taking the best
left-handed pitcher in baseball and converting him into a right fielder
is one of the dumbest things I ever heard.” For those of us not
familiar with baseball, Babe Ruth was one of the greatest outfielders
who ever played the game.
The world’s greatest geniuses are by no means exempt from out-and-out
nonsense. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was probably the greatest
scientist of all time. He laid the foundation for classical mechanics;
his genius transformed our understanding of physics, mathematics, and
astronomy.
What’s not widely known is that Newton spent most of his waking hours
on alchemy. Some of his crackpot experiments included trying to turn
lead into gold. He wrote volumes on alchemy, but after his death,
Britain’s Royal Society deemed that they were “not fit to be printed.”
Then there’s mathematical physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin
(1824-1907), whose major contribution was in thermodynamics. Kelvin is
widely recognized for determining the correct value of absolute zero,
approximately minus 273.15 degrees Celsius or minus 459.67 degrees
Fahrenheit. In honor of his achievement, extremely high and extremely
low temperatures are expressed in units called kelvins.
To prove that one can be a genius in one area and an idiot in another,
Kelvin challenged geologists by saying that Earth is between 20 million
and 100 million years old. Kelvin predicted, “X-rays will prove to be a
hoax.” And he told us, “I can state flatly that heavier-than-air flying
machines are impossible.”
The point of all this is to say that we can listen to experts but take
what they predict with a grain or two of salt.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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